The letters are not "new". They were first published as an Appendix to Toni Saldívar's 1992 book Sylvia Plath: Confessing the Fictive Self (Peter Lang) on pages 201-206. However, at the time of the books publication Carey still held the letters, and not all of the letters were printed. To protect his interests, for example, Father Michael's name was redacted, and some of Plath's handwritten additions/postscripts were not included. Although the letters were published, I will give a brief paraphrase of each to be consistent to the other recent archives-themed posts, however some of Plath's letters will be quoted and page numbers refer to their publication in Saldívar's book.

Plath sent five letters to Carey in 1962 and 1963. In 1962, letters were sent on 23 October; 21 November; 23 November; and 16 December. In 1963, Plath sent a letter on 4 February.

23 October 1962: Typed letter apologizing for a delay in responding to his letter stating that the flu had been a leading cause. She writes that she would enjoy reading his poems but that if he is looking for encouragement or an admission of talent that she will not be able to help him. The desire to write must come from himself. She invites him to tea if he is ever in Devon before December and mentions her plan to be in the west of Ireland after December.

21 November 1962: Typed letter again apologizing for being too long in replying to him stating this delay was due to children, apple trees, bees and the prospect of a flat in London. She discusses the kinds of poets she sees in his poetry: a "lyrical-traditional" one and one that produces "meticulously-observed phrases" (202). His poetry is a blend of the almost archaic and the modern, 20th century; and Plath clearly prefers the 20th century lyrics. She advises him to "Speak straight out" (203). Plath describes herself as an obsessed-with-God atheist; that she is interested in philosophy and theology and briefly describes "Berck-Plage" (which had just aired on the BBC on the 17th). Along with this letter, Plath sent Father Carey a typescript of her poem "Mary's Song" which she wrote two days earlier on 19 November 1962.

29 November 1962: Typed letter thanking Father Michael for sending her a blessing. She writes just briefly that when he study's poetry he should learn it by heart, not necessarily study to anatomize as one might in school, mentioning that she hated Milton (implying I think that until she studied him she hated him). Plath writes that she would be willing to answer autobiographical questions that he posed to her. Plath closes her letter with a handwritten postscript asking Father Michael to bless Yeats' house for her.

16 December 1962: Typed letter thanking Father Michael for the blessings he bestowed as it all seemed to work out as she and her children were ensconced in Yeats' house in London. She relates the ordeal of getting there and talks about all the work she has to do to make the flat livable and her own. She again offers for him to drop down from Oxford for tea, commenting that Primrose Hill has always been her favorite area of London, from her first initiation to London at a Fulbright student to now. Plath responds to an autobiographical question Father Michael posed with a reference to Peer Gynt: "Myself" (205). We can perhaps infer that his autobiographical question had to with the source of inspiration for her writing. But the truth is we may never know what question he asked. She closes wishing him a Happy Christmas.

The gap between the above letter and Plath's final letter to Carey on 4 February 1963 was seven weeks. The Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College holds one letter from Carey to Plath dated 28 January 1963. One feels he must have grown impatient at not hearing from her. Carey in this letter apologizes for perhaps being too harsh or too critical, he wrote what he wrote to start a discussion about modern poets, which he felt fell into two schools: those who want to be obscure and those that are so direct as to write with "surgical clarity". Plath had suggested he read Sir Thomas Wyatt's lyrical poetry and he obtained Wyatt's Omnia Opera. He mentions that universally it appears accepted that one reads Chaucer is for narrative and Shakespeare for drama, but inquires who he should read for lyrical as the jury was out as to which writer was the definitive one.

I certainly wish there were more letters TO Plath that existed as we might then have a better idea of how she corresponded. Instead, rather, what we do have it a one-sided view of the correspondence. But because this letter from Carey is extant, we get a glimpse of his initial response from, presumably, mid-to-late December and can see Plath's response from just a week before her death.

4 February 1963: Plath again mentions a delay in her writing due to flu and fever and that she's crawling out of those doldrums finally. She has been making curtains and writing poems at dawn. She enjoyed his harshness and critique and was not offended. Regarding the two schools of poetry that Carey wrote about, Plath says that good poets do not seek to be unclear or hazy; and that she certainly does not. Rather, the nature of compression in poetry means sometimes that obscurity happens. She ends suggesting he read Yeats for his lyricism. Carey has annotated this letter at the bottom in pencil that Plath died 11 February 1963 and writes "R.I.P".

One thing I have noticed in working with all the known (and found) letters that Plath wrote is that she frequently sent more than one letter per day; as though she saved her letter writing for a particular day of the week and then churned them out. This is not always the case, but it does add some perspective to her daily activities as mother, daughter, writer, business-woman, friend, correspondent, mentor, what have you. Below is a list of other letters and writings that Plath achieved on the days that she wrote to Father Michael Carey.

23 October 1962: Letters to Eric Walter White (University of Texas at Austin) and Aurelia Plath (Indiana); and started drafting "Lady Lazarus". Susan O'Neill-Roe started the day before; Plath had Nancy Axworthy in, as well, in the morning and according to her Letts calendar she went to Bloggs (garage);baked banana bread; picked apples; and did laundry, among other activities.

21 November 1962: no other known letters. On this day according to her Letts calendar she emptied the ashcans; drew out £10 from the bank; visited Winifred Davies in the evening and brought her Taroc pack (and maybe her "weird luck").

29 November 1962: Letters to Harriet Cooke (privately owned); Karl Miller/The New Statesman (draft, Smith College); and Aurelia Plath (Indiana). Susan O-Neill-Roe was off this day; she went to the grocery and the bank as saw a film that night in the Film Society.

16 December 1962: Letter to Douglas Cleverdon (BBC). She was deep into fixing up and painting the flat at 23 Fitzroy Road; she ordered The Observer and Radio Times;

4 February 1963: Letters to Marcia Brown Stern (Smith) and Aurelia Plath (Indiana); writes "Contusion". According to her poetry/prose submissions list (held at Smith College) she sent a batch of poems this day to The New Yorker, but this seems unlikely as poems she wrote on the next day (the 5th) were included.

Certainly I think this humanizes Plath in some ways to see the sum of her output in a calendric fashion. Of course this spells out biographical details that may or may not have any bearing on literary criticism of her creative writing, but I do not see the detriment in knowing what she was doing day-by-day. In fact her productivity in everything garners more and more respect from me; I am simply amazed at what she was able to accomplish in such a short life. And, this (what we have and know about) is not even all of it!

Carey passed away on 9 November 2007 in Coconut Creek, Florida. An obituary for him ran in the Assumption alumnae magazine:

Michael Carey AP’46, ’51, Coconut Creek, FL, died November 9, 2007.
A former Assumptionist, Mike taught English Assumption Prep and edited the 1961 Prep Directory. He studied at Oxford and Yale Universities and had a career in health care administration, primarily in Florida. Proficient in French and Spanish, he was a private tutor for
many years and translated several books from French to English. Mike composed 15 children’s
plays and most of them were performed throughout Florida. He leaves his wife, Janice;
daughters Siobhan, J. Patricia and Aimee; and five granddaughters.

In addition to the letters, the Library holds Carey's copy of The Colossus (Heinemann, 1960) which he purchased at a bookshop in Oxford in June 1963.

As I have been highlighting different archival collections, I realized this one was "missing" from the record, as well as from being listed in the Archival Materials page on my website for Sylvia Plath. This has now been posted and listed!

21 January 2014

Anyone interested in books by and/or about Sylvia Plath would be doing themselves a favor by shopping for them online via ABEbooks.com. They have a lot to choose from, be it a reading copy from a mom & pop shop to replace one that got damaged in a sudden rain storm or a collectible book from a high end dealer that you are buying with your disposable income for me (haha), a sweetheart, for yourself or some other reasons…Remember, books are something that can be enjoyed in nearly any conceivable place, and they can also be a sound investment.

Sylvia Plath's works have frequently been mentioned on ABE's site, due in part both to her popularity as well as her collectibility. Who knows, they may even have a Plathophile on staff! I have been working slowly (sad, I know) on this post since 2011 and it seems to be the right time to finally post it.

Scott Laming over on ABEbooks.com, did a write up on “Bleak Books: The Top 10 Most Depressing Books”. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar made number two! I do not know if congratulations are in order or if the people that voted are of a limited intelligence. Laming himself recognizes that Plath’s suicide just weeks after the novel’s publication has conflated the story told in the novel.

The Bell Jar has won some additional accolades on ABEbooks.com in the recent past; you may remember in May 2010 I posted that the first Faber edition of 1966 was listed as one of the top 50 iconic book covers. While I love the Faber cover, the original dust jacket is far more lovely and haunting.

These are just a few of the times Plath has been mentioned. By and large her greatest representation on the website is via the books and other items that are for sale. Set aside some money each pay period, save it up, and treat yourself to something nice this year. It is easy math, even for English majors: $50 a month will get you a $600 book by the end of the year. Go on, stop reading this blog and buy something.

In a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes from May 1959, she included a recipe for her heavenly sponge cake. Plath recommends making the cake in a funneled high cake pan, which my wife tells me is like a angel food cake pan (also known as a tube pan. If you are a fan of a certain Plath scholar you can use a bundt pan and achieve ... wait for it ... Bundt-zen! Sorry.). Plath even includes a drawing of the pan in the left margin of her typed letter.

Being wholly culinarily uncoordinated, I begged (it was not pretty) my wife to try the recipe out.

Plath includes pretty detailed instructions for making the cake. Not being able to quote them I will paraphrase…

Beat egg yolks together until they are lemon-colored adding sugar as you go;
Add water and the flavorings;
Beat while adding the cake flour;
Beat egg whites to a froth (can you just imagine the joy this gave Plath?);
Add in the baking powder and salt to the frothed egg whites;
Continue beating until very firm;
Fold this gently and thoroughly into the egg yolk stuff;
Add in granulated sugar over the top before placing in oven;
Oven should be at 325° and it bakes for one hour;
Wait until the cake pan is cold before removing.

Plath instructs her sister-in-law to sift the sugar; but granulated sugar does not need sifting. We did sift the cake flour ("Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, / Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.") and feel that Plath may have put the sift part in the wrong place… Who knows, it might have been an act of unconscious, devilish cake sabotage? And, we cheated, using our pink mod cons rather than doing stuff by hand... She ends the letter wishing Olwyn some happy times with her eating. This letter is held by the British Library in the Olwyn Hughes Correspondence: ADD Ms 88948/1/1.

The cake turned out nicely, very light (though heavier and more dense than angel food cake) with a scrumptiously crispy sugary top and a nice flavor of lemon throughout, which surprised us as there is really so little in there. We recommend cutting large portions and serving with a hot beverage (tea or mocha, perhaps) and your favorite book by or about Sylvia Plath.

I see you looking while I was "quiet at my cooking"...
(and shameless self-promotion)

Plath made various sponge cakes in her time: some lemon, some orange, and likely some other. She made a sponge cake several times in North Tawton. One time she made it for the Tyrer's, but she ended up serving it to Rose Key over tea as the Tyrer's did not show up. She called it her "big fancy sponge cake made with 6 eggs" (Journals 665). Rose Key (wisely) praised it. The journal entry is undated, but it might have been circa 3 February 1962 as the words "cake -- sponge" appear in her 1962 Lett's calendar (housed at Smith College). In a 7 February 1962 letter to her mother, Plath writes about making Aunt Dotty's 6-egg sponge that week. She later made a sponge cake on 21 April 1962 (also on her Letts calendar, and two days after she wrote "Elm"). This time she served it to Marjorie and Nicola Tyrer and was told how Nicola's underwear had been caught in their charwoman's hoover. And on that note...

14 January 2014

The Library at University of Wisconsin at Madison has the archive of the journal Arts in Society. Sylvia Plath published three poems in an early issue of the serial (Volume 1, Number 2) in the Fall of 1959. The three poems were "Aftermath," "The Goring," and "Sculptor."

And see images of the pages in which the poems appeared: Page 66 ("Aftermath" and "The Goring") & Page 67 ("Sculptor").

All pages are downloadable as good quality PDF's, which is sweet. Does seeing these three poems here, together as a unit, give them a different context to their order --each appears in a different year, 1956; 1958; and 1959 respectively-- in Plath's Collected Poems? Plath left "The Goring" out of The Colossus, is it weaker than the other two?

10 January 2014

Smith College holds photocopies of sheet music (covers only) formerly owned by Sylvia Plath. A note with these documents reads "Original sheet music in Newnham College, Cambridge Archives. Sheet music was left by Plath in her rooms at Newnham College, 1956 (?)." Four of the covers have Plath's signature; three have notes by Aurelia Plath. The original sheet music is now held by the Newnham College Archives, Cambridge, England.

The * by numbers 3, 5, 6, and 9 indicate the presence of Plath's ownership signature.

We know Plath was inspired by and responded creatively to art. Music was important to Plath, too. Which makes sense as she was attuned to the cadence and structure of words and lines of verse in her poetry. Especially so at this time (that is, pre-1957, as Plath moved out of Newnham in the late autumn of 1956) since her poetry was more formal. Plath had piano lessons as a teenager and wrote to her German pen pal Hans Joachim-Neupert that she enjoyed popular music and that she could play "Boogie-Woogie" on the piano. She listened to Marcia Brown play piano in the summer of 1951 and remembered this ten years later in her 1961 poem "The Babysitters": "I remember you playing 'Ja-Da' in a pink piqué dress / On the gameroom piano..." (Collected Poems 175). Plath also wrote a scene involving a piano and piano-player in her novel The Bell Jar. In the scene a patient in Dr. Gordon's private hospital in Walton tears her sheet music in half (Chapter 12). In addition to the titles listed above, some others that Plath mentioned purchasing include the piano music for "These
Foolish Things"; "September Song"; "I'm in the Mood for
Love"; and "The Man I Love".

Plath enjoyed listening to her boyfriend J. Mallory Wober play his portable organ in her rooms, as well as in his room, then located at 7 Peas Hill (map; Google Maps says that it is about .8 miles walking distance (about 16 minutes) from Plath's Whitstead residence at 4 Barton Road; however, they do not have a "walking with organ" option). She wrote in a letter to Wober once that she cannot live in a room with no music; and mentioned listening to or playing the piano in many other letters to people including, among others: her mother and brother, Marcia Brown, Gordon Lamayer, Constantin Sidamon-Eristoff, Eddie Cohen, Elinor Klein, Lynne Lawner, Olive Higgins Prouty, Helga Huws, and Elizabeth Sigmund (then Compton). Plath wanted a piano, too, at Court Green so that she could play for her children, and likely also so her children could take lessons.

You can see more libraries that hold Plath materials on the Archival Collections page of my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is.

07 January 2014

Carl Rollyson (website; Twitter), author of American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, graciously gave me original copies of The Wellesleyan for 1949 and 1950. The Wellesleyan was the yearbook of Gamaliel Bradford High School, from where Sylvia Plath graduated in June 1950. Included with the yearbooks was a small cache of articles about Sylvia Plath publications spanning nearly half a century:

Howard, Maureen, "The Girl Who Tried to be Good." The New York Times Book Review. December 14, 1975: 1-2.

Jefferson, Margo. "Who Was Sylvia?" Newsweek. December 22, 1975: 83.

"The Blood Jet is Poetry." Time 87. June 10, 1966: 118-120.

While the articles are fascinating, the yearbooks are the focus of this blog post. I have gone through them carefully and have scanned all of Plath's appearances that I found, plus one instance where Plath might be in a photograph but it is a general photo: not of a classroom or an extracurricular group shot. In the 1950 yearbook, Plath has an artwork reproduced. I have not included that in this post as it is under her copyright still. However, it was reproduced under the title "Kids fixing car" on page 24 in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual (Google Book). In the 1950 yearbook, this drawing appeared on page 78.

Normally I do not post images on this blog for which I have not obtained permission or where copyright is a concern. Granted that these school photographs belong to someone, I have not been able to track them down and operate under the premise that this usage is educational, not for profit, and fair use.

01 January 2014

In 2013, I kept track of many of the articles published about Sylvia Plath on a special page of this blog. I never intended to see it last the whole year, but it did and proved to be one of the more popularly hit pages. However, the 50th anniversaries of so much (The Bell Jar & Plath's death) are now over. I did not want to just delete the data, so here it is in full in its own blog post! All links were accessed and valid on the date of the article published.

This page is temporary, but will compile online articles and links that appear surrounding the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, as well as articles about the 50th anniversary of her death. Additional articles that appear on publications such as Carl Rollyson's biography American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's Press), Andrew Wilson's Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (Simon & Schuster), and Elizabeth Winder's Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (HarperCollins) will also be listed.